Prewar intelligence failures merit investigation

Mike Thompson

Published
4:00 am PDT, Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Americans deserve to know all the facts that led us to where we are today in Iraq. They should not have to default to television's partisan, shouting-heads news shows to get answers. Nor should they accept government spin. An independent investigation is warranted.

The recent revelation by a former Bush Administration diplomat dismissing one of the President's central reasons for the Iraq war as being based on "false intelligence" calls into serious question the quality of information produced by our national and international security agencies.

Compounding the problem, press reports quoting administration officials who say the White House may have knowingly used the faulty claims to justify the war are challenging the integrity of other prewar intelligence.

Former American Ambassador Joseph Wilson was enlisted last year by the CIA and Vice President Cheney to travel to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium for a nuclear weapons program. He reported that he found no evidence for those claims and says he shared his findings with the CIA. A year later the President cited the Niger threat in his State of the Union speech, which used an impressive array of intelligence reports to convince the majority of Americans, Congress and the media that we were in imminent danger from Iraq.

The White House has defended the statement as being technically correct, because it was changed to reference a British white paper on the subject. The Washington Post reported that the CIA tried to persuade the British government that the report was false long before the president's speech. A recent CBS news investigation also reported that the White House had declined a request by the CIA to remove the statement from the president's speech.

The phony Iraq-Niger deal leads to further questions about prewar intelligence reports. Intelligence officers said during Congressional briefings that Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction on American troops once they stepped on Iraqi soil. They also said that the administration had evidence of alleged Baghdad-al Qaeda ties. Both were used to sell the war. Both were later proved to be false.

As far as our intelligence agencies' report card goes, we now know that it doesn't matter whether weapons of mass destruction are found. Our CIA and National Security Council flunked the "imminent danger" portion of the test because WMDs were never used.

It would be folly to miscalculate the rising call for answers as the rantings of those who originally questioned our role in this war. And it would be shortsighted merely to find a scapegoat, hang the blame on a single bureaucrat and pronounce the matter closed.

Two efforts have been introduced in Congress to get the answers we need to prevent future security lapses. Legislation by Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, would force public hearings on the integrity of our intelligence reports by creating a bipartisan select committee made up of 15 members of the House. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, has introduced a bill to create an investigatory board, independent of Congressional partisans and modeled after the Sept. 11 independent commission. The White House, Congress and the public need to get behind both initiatives.

At best, mistaken assertions were based on faulty intelligence reports. At worst, there was a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the American public.

It is in everyone's best interest, including the President, to get to the bottom of this. Fast. This is about the safety of our troops and the integrity of our government, not presidential primaries or partisan politics. Bad security information is neither a Republican problem nor a Democratic problem. It is an American problem we all have to repair.

An independent investigation can put to rest suspicions that Americans accepted a war -- which is costing $4 billion a month and has claimed 220 American lives so far -- based on wrong information.